Roundup: Reactions to Microsoft’s OOXML win

After months of discussion and no shortage of controversy, Microsoft’s Office Open XML format was officially ratified as an international ISO standard this week. The ratification could lead to broader acceptance of the document format used by the latest version of Microsoft Office programs. Such standards play a big role in government buying decisions. The Open Document Format, used by the competing OpenOffice suite, was already an ISO standard. Here’s a sampling of reaction to the news:

Microsoft’s Tom Robertson, in an interview this week:

“We already see (OOXML) adopted in products from IBM, Sun, Novell, across multiple platforms. … It is a completely appropriate outcome that the global community has now embraced it and has taken ownership of it. … With this, you do have a leveling of the playing field between the different formats that are ratified by ISO — HTML, PDF, ODF, and Open XML. Each of these formats has different characteristics. They’re designed to meet different needs in the marketplace, and users are able to make a choice as to which one best suits their needs. We obviously believe that Open XML is the right path, because we’ve heard from our customers that this is what they want. We’ve heard from the IT industry that they’re excited to work with this, and the unique characteristics of this format that ODF doesn’t have. Our view is that choice is the outcome here, and that’s going to lead to more innovation, ultimately benefitting customers.”

“Red Hat was disappointed but hardly surprised that the single-vendor, monopolist-promulgated standard, Office Open XML, made it though an unfortunately flawed fast-track ISO approval process. We also note that there remains an ongoing investigation by the European competition authorities into the practices employed in the process. … So, if you define interoperability as single vendor’s format to promote operation with that same vendor’s dominant product, you can declare victory. But Red Hat thinks governments and enterprises are not so easily confused. The Open Document Format, which has long been a multiparty-supported ISO standard, will continue to be a force in procurement decisions to be reckoned with.”

International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners, statement:

“We are grateful that our members will still be able to deliver solutions built on OOXML without being limited in public tenders by only using ODF. … We see that it is good to provide customers with a choice of equally recognized document formats and we think the world will benefit with competition of standards just as in many other sectors. … Our members have been afraid that if OOXML would not have made it as an ISO standard they would have been forced to, in some tenders, offer solutions built on what we consider a document format that is less rich in functionality. This would have put a limitation in solutions that our members would have been able to offer.

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems, statement:

“The decision undermines ODF, the existing open standard for electronic documents and will reinforce Microsoft’s desk-top monopoly. This will disrupt the market, stifle innovation and hinder interoperability and vendor choice, so important to customers. … By refusing to support ODF natively in its products and pushing its proprietary OOXML standard through the ISO process, Microsoft is seeking to undermine existing open standards and is violating its own interoperability principles announced on 21 February.”

“ISO/IEC approval of this global standard represents an important milestone in our goal to support access to billions of existing binary documents, as well as to enable interoperability across office productivity applications and with line-of-business systems. … The constructive input provided by ISO/IEC National Bodies around the world to improve and clarify the [Draft International Standard] text has resulted in an enhanced open standard that meets extensive requirements to support continued implementation across the industry.”

“We now enter the next phase of the dance. Customers will discover they don’t get the benefits that they thought they bought. A customer of note [likely government] or a consortia will put together a conformance certification program around the standards in the space. Brands and certifications will be the rule of the day. Microsoft will discover it needs to actually ensure their own products adhere [formally] to the standards they produced. The Microsoft Office team will discover conformance testing to a specification is (i.) hard work, (ii.) different than normal product testing, and (iii) that their product is drifting off the very standard they launched.”